Soren Kierkegaard quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Soren Kierkegaard

Soren Kierkegaard Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Soren Kierkegaard on Wise Famous Quotes.

Preparation for becoming attentive to Christianity does not consist in reading many books ... but in fuller immersion in existence.

Most people rush after pleasure so fast that they rush right past it.

The supreme paradox of all thought is the attempt to discover something that thought cannot think.

It is a question of discovering a truth which is truth for me, of finding the idea for which I am willing to live and die.

Take away paradox from the thinker and you have a professor.

That is the road we all have to take - over the Bridge of Sight into eternity.

Death cannot explain itself. The earnestness consists precisely in this, that the observer must explain it to himself.

Once you label me you negate me.

The most painful state of being is remembering the future, particularly the one you'll never have.

Comparison is the most dangerous acquaintance love can make.

To be a saint is to will the one thing.

To love another person is to help them love God.

Hope is a passion for the possible.

- a bad conscience is indeed able to make life interesting.

My tactics were, by God's aid, to employ every means to make it clear what the requirement of Christianity truly is.

What our age lacks is not reflection, but passion.

Life is lived forwards, but understood backwards.

If anyone on the verge of action should judge himself according to the outcome, he would never begin.

Battle day and night against the guile of oblivion ...

It's better to get lost in the passion than to lose the passion

And this is one of the most crucial definitions for the whole of Christianity; that the opposite of sin is not virtue but faith.

For I have trained myself and am training myself always to be able to dance lightly in the service of thought

To be a teacher does not mean simply to affirm that such a thing is so, or to deliver a lecture, etc.

The tyrant dies and his rule is over, the martyr dies and his rule begins.

To have faith is precisely to lose one's mind so as to win God.

Everyone looks the same to me in a photograph: stupid.

People understand me so poorly that they don't even understand my complaint about them not understanding me.

What labels me, negates me.

The object of (Christian) faith is not the teaching but the Teacher.

The less support an idea has,the more fervently it must be believed in, so that a totally preposterous idea requires unflinching faith.

The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology.

Sleeping is the height of genius

The thing that cowardice fears most is decision

If he is not supposed to be that, then he is a hypocrite, and the higher he climbs on this path, the more dreadful a hypocrite he is.

Christendom has done away with Christianity without being quite aware of it.

With respect to physical existence, one needs little, and to the degree that one needs less, the more perfect one is.

To cheat oneself out of love is the most terrible deception; it is an eternal loss for which there is no reparation, either in time or in eternity.

What is truth but to live for an idea?

Who am I? How did I come into the world? Why was I not consulted?

The best proof adduced of the wretchedness of life is that derived from contemplating its glory.

One becomes weary only of what is new.

Therefore do not deceive yourself! Of all deceivers fear most yourself!

My sorrow is my castle.

He who loved himself became great in himself, and he who loved others became great through his devotion, but he who loved God became greater than all.

Far from idleness being the root of all evil, it is rather the only true good.

It is the normal state of the human heart to try to build its identity around something besides God.

Trouble is the common denominator of living. It is the great equalizer.

The question is asked in ignorance, by one who does not even know what can have led him to ask it.

Old age realizes the dreams of youth: look at Dean Swift; in his youth he built an asylum for the insane, in his old age he was himself an inmate.

Sin is: in despair not wanting to be oneself before God.

Patience is necessary, and one cannot reap immediately where one has sown.

Out of love, God becomes man. He says: See, here is what it is to be a human being.

Boredom is the root of all evil - the despairing refusal to be oneself.

Only the one who descends into the underworld rescues the beloved.

Take it and return it: the kiss of love.

Don't forget to love yourself.

Take a chance and you may lose. Take not a chance and you have lost already.

If a man cannot forget, he will never amount to much.

The most common form of despair is not being who you are.

On the whole, the longing for solitude is a sign that there still is spirit in a person and is a measure of what spirit there is.

Only one human being recognized as one's neighbour is necessary in order to cure a man of self-love

People settle for a level of despair they can tolerate and call it happiness.

A 'no' does not hide anything, but a 'yes' very easily becomes a deception.

In the eyes of God, the infinite spirit, all the millions that have lived and now live do not make a crowd. He only sees each individual

One can advise comfortably from a safe port.

To dare is to momentarily lose one's footing.
But not to dare is to lose one's self.

Faith is the highest passion in a human being. Many in every
generation may not come that far, but none comes further.

It is unbelievable what a person of prayer can achieve if he would but close the doors behind him.

Job endured everything - until his friends came to comfort him, then he grew impatient.

To the frivolous Christianity is certainly not glad tidings, for it wishes first of all to make them serious.

Irony is a qualification of subjectivity.

People do not know what they ought to say but only that they must say something.

I must find a truth that is true for me.

When you read God's Word, you must constantly be saying to yourself, "It is talking to me, and about me".

There is peace and rest and comfort in sorrow

Adversity not only draws people together, but brings forth that beautiful inward friendship.

Fate, then, is the nothing of anxiety.

Seducing a girl is no art, but it needs a stroke of good fortune to find one worth seducing.

My melancholy is the most faithful sweetheart I have had.

What is youth? A dream. What is love? The dream's content.

Christ has not only spoken to us by his life but has also spoken for us by his death.

It is a frightful satire and an epigram on the modern age that the only use it knows for solitude is to make it a punishment, a jail sentence.

Be that self that one is

Sin is in itself separation from the good, but despair over sin is separation a second time.

The highest and most beautiful things in life are not to be heard about, nor read about, nor seen but, if one will, are to be lived.

It is impossible to exist without passion

Which is more difficult, to awaken one who sleeps or to awaken one who, awake, dreams that he is awake?

The present state of the world and the whole of life is diseased. If I were a doctor and were asked for my advice, I should reply, 'Create silence'.

The more a person limits himself, the more resourceful he becomes.

Metaphorically speaking, a person's ideas must be the building he lives in - otherwise there is something terribly wrong.

Our life always expresses the result of our dominant thoughts.

It belongs to the imperfection of everything human that man can only attain his desire by passing through its opposite.

she does not suspect how much reason I have for deprecating all sympathy.

When all combine in every way to make everything easier, people will want difficulty. I conceived it as my task to make difficulties everywhere.

The truth is a trap: you cannot get it without it getting you; you cannot get the truth by capturing it, only by its capturing you.

Love does not alter the beloved, it alters itself.

Only one deception is possible in the infinite sense, self-deception.

The presence of irony does not necessarily mean that the earnestness is excluded. Only assistant professors assume that.

How to be listed as a dream in the mind of a young girl is an art, going out is a masterpiece.

Choose to be who you are ... The individual who would become a person must at some point take over his entire being - must, that is, choose herself.